The Lilac House by Anita Nair Page A

have washed ashore on the coast three days later.
     
    He caught her searching his face. Her little fingers were wrapped around his wrist.
    ‘Papa, did your wish come true?’
    Jak smiled. He had been so afraid that he had forgotten to make his wish. ‘I never feared the sea again.’
    ‘You are not afraid of the sea! Really?’ Her eyes sought his. They had been teaching her to swim then. ‘All that water around you, over you, you were very afraid at first, right Papa?’
    Nina came in from her study then. ‘Kitcha, you know you shouldn’t fill her head with your stories. As it is, she is a reluctant swimmer. And now you are going to scare her even further!’ As if to erase the sting of her words, Nina ruffled his hair as she went past.
    She hadn’t yet got to the point when all he did, all he said, even the way he breathed, was an affront to her.
     
    ‘Of course I was scared at first. But then I learnt something. I
learnt to respect the sea and I was never afraid again. You must always treat water with respect,’ he said. ‘No silliness. No taking stupid risks. You see, that’s why Minjikapuram has a very important place in my life. I learnt a lesson there. You don’t run away from things that terrify you. The water scared me but not for long. If you understand it, it will never be able to dominate or scare you.’ Jak was trying to be at his paternal best. A father imparting life lessons and guiding his child through the complexities of living.
    He saw the intensity of Smriti’s gaze. She was a child who took everything he said to be the holy truth. She would never allow him any fallibility or weakness. And so, feeling a sudden qualm of disquiet at how seriously she took him, he reached across and pulled her pigtail. ‘Do you know when I was really scared?’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘When I asked your mother to marry me. I was shaking. Now that was scary!’
    Nina smiled at him from across the room. ‘Liar,’ she mouthed. ‘Liar, liar, liar…’
     
    Jak pretended to cringe. ‘Do you know who she was?’ He turned to Smriti.
    ‘She was the Madras Girl. The only Madras Girl in all of Syracuse. And I was this really wide-eyed boy from a little alley in Mylapore. A little brahmin boy who couldn’t even figure out which jeans to buy. But the Madras Girl knew everything.
    ‘And that wasn’t all. When I asked her to marry me, she gave me the Madras Eye. Do you know what that is?’ Jak narrowed his eyes till they were slits. ‘She looked at me through her sunglasses with her Madras Eye and said, “I don’t know Kitcha, I don’t know.”’
    ‘Kitcha, stop filling the child’s head with misinformation. I don’t know why you do it. Smriti, listen to me. Madras Eye is conjunctivitis. I don’t know what Papa means by saying I gave him the Madras Eye…’ Nina stirred her coffee and licked the spoon.
    ‘But she knew, Papa, she knew she wanted to marry you. That’s why you married each other and I am here and baby Shruti,’ Smriti
cried, aching to be part of that moment when Kitcha and Nina, Papa and Mama had found each other.
     
    Kitcha, Nina, Smriti and Shruti. When did it all change?
    A wave breaks over his head.
    The middle phase. It is this period that you need to watch for, Jak thinks.
    He has seen it happen. How, sometimes, even a well developed wave, a young cyclone full of promise, will not grow into the mature one they had predicted it would.
    Jak wonders why he didn’t see it coming. As his life became more and more contained in classrooms and labs, he failed to sense the change. And Nina and he grew apart… until one day the marriage was over.
     
    The embarrassment, the shame, the disappointment… You resorted to the God of the Gaps theory to explain the dying out of promise to your children. You felt the eyes of your older child trail you and Nina. You saw her gather her younger sister into the fold of her embrace. She didn’t trust either Nina or you as parents any